Danger Rode on New Jersey Transit Engineer's Coveted Shift

Published: February 18, 1996

(Page 2 of 3)

In a rare acknowledgment of the risks inherent in routine, one 56-year-old New Jersey Transit engineer, Charles Cooper, snowy-haired, with gold-rimmed glasses, stood in a quiet corner of the Hoboken terminal recently and spoke of the monotony, saying: "There are times when I said to myself, 'Jesus Christ, did I make that last station?' "

"It's extremely boring," Mr. Cooper said. "The people like me, who run the trains, my mind is 1,000 miles away. I'm daydreaming. I don't know if an engineer takes things for granted. When I say he's 'a thousand miles away,' it's that everything is automatic for him. Their subconscious is 100 percent on the job."

Sometimes, the subconscious disengages.

Mr. DeCurtis made four documented mistakes that had earned him suspensions since New Jersey Transit formed, merging with Mr. DeCurtis's old railroad, Conrail, in 1982. He ran two red lights in 1986 and 1989, missed a station in 1987 and derailed a train in 1983. Mr. Cooper, who said it is uncommon for an engineer to run a red light, has himself run a couple of red lights in his career, he said.

All of Mr. DeCurtis's incidents occurred before he took over the coveted night shift, a split shift set aside primarily for veteran engineers who work eight hours, interrupted by a few hours sleep, but get paid for 12.

Although his record had been clean for the last six years, Mr. DeCurtis had trouble distinguishing colors in a voluntary vision exam last December. He had no trouble telling apart red, yellow and green, the mandatory part of the test. But he failed to recognize the number of colored dots inside a circle in 4 out of 14 cases and was classified as suffering from minor color deficiency. Colleagues are quick to point out that the test, part of a new round of stricter certifications required in the wake of a 1987 fatal crash, did not establish that he was color blind.

"If they felt he was unsafe, he wouldn't have been working," said a conductor, who worked with Mr. DeCurtis on occasion, and asked that his name not be used.

From inside a train's cab, a space not much larger than an oversized closet, engineers fix their gaze past the broad windows to the track ahead. They watch for signals alongside the tracks -- reds, greens and yellows -- that caution them to slow down or permit them to speed up. Some signals use two or three colors in tandem. A yellow light over a red light over a red light means one thing. Mix the colors up and it means something else.

When the signals are all-clear, an engineer moves the throttle, and increases the train's speed, usually from 50 to 70 miles per hour. As the signals change, so does a train's speed, slowing to 30 miles per hour and finally to a dead stop as the engineer pulls on the brake.

On his last night, for almost seven straight hours, Mr. DeCurtis guided the train up and down the Bergen line, picking up and dropping off passengers along indistinguishable platforms from Hoboken to Waldwick, and back again, then to Suffern, N.Y. and back again. At 12:58 A.M. he pulled into the Suffern rail yard for his rest-over.

Mr. DeCurtis traveled down the railroad, throttling and braking and listening to the only sound in his cab, the voice of a dispatcher announcing any sudden changes or new routes. Occasionally, the conductor, Stephen Miller, stepped into the cab to exchange a few words.

Along the way up and down the line, certain thoughts and fears stay fixed near an engineer's consciousness. The weight of an engineer's responsibility is one. A train's vulnerability is another. One simple derailment, a wheel that slips off a track, can trigger chaos.

But engineers are most haunted by something else, something that should be part of the job description because for those who work the railroads long enough, it is bound to happen.

"I've killed five people," Mr. Cooper said matter-of-factly.

Some of the dead are suicides, people who bash their cars into trains to end their lives. Or they are young men playing chicken, trying to outrun the train across the tracks.

"Once I hit a 13-year-old kid on a motor bike," the engineer said. "You never forget it. You always try to second-guess yourself."

The Break Few Hours Sleep On a Train's Seat

Suffern, N.Y., after midnight is a desolate place. The railroad tracks run just alongside the edge of the working-class town on the New Jersey border. Idling trains slumber in the eerie half-light, a quarter-mile walk from the shuttered wood depot.

On any given night, only a few rail workers are around. There are two small trailers near the depot with a few chairs and tables. There is no place to lie down, nothing to eat, no coffee to drink.

Train crews on the overnight split shift are allowed to spend their break time in a hotel, but they would have to find a way to get there and would have to pay for it themselves. So Mr. DeCurtis did what most workers do: spend the night on the train.

The break lasted five hours, but for the first 15 minutes Mr. DeCurtis secured the train. He and Mr. Miller walked from one end to the other and prepared to camp out in the first car. They carried an alarm clock to make sure to wake up a half hour before the dawn run, so they could check the brakes and get ready to leave.